Category: Drought

I thought it would be fun to look at our Fall of 2023 climate and now close what happened came to what would typically happen during an El Niño Fall.

In our string of nationally much warmer than normal seasons, the fall of 2023 was 124th out of 129 falls for warmer than normal. This puts this fall warmer than 96% of all falls since 1895! No area of the CONUS had a below normal temperatures (bottom 1/3 coldest) this fall.

At the risk of going overboard on the Summer of 2023, I have another set of charts you may want to look at.

I through it would be fun and informative to see the frequency for hot days across our Nation.

Here I have the frequency for highs in the 90s across the CONUS (Continental United States), the longest streak across the CONUS, the frequency of lows of 70 or more and I few more NCEI charts to show how hot of a summer this was both nationally and regionally. I also have a few precipitation maps so you can see that the great frequency for hot weather was were it rained less, relative to normal for that area.

I have added 2 slides to this presentation ( 8 and 9). These two slides show that what one uses for the “normal”, greatly impacts what the departure from normal looks like. I used 1991 to 2020, the official NWS normal period for the image on the top left, then 1895 to 2000 for the image on the top right, not the area of below normal is significantly less. That is because the period 1991 to 2020 was warmer than the 1895 to 2000 period. On the bottom left the mean is 1895 to 2020, that has no below normal areas. This seems questionable to me since the ranked normal’s on the next slide look a lot like the 1895 to 2000 on slide 8. I added this because I was getting some questions on this matter. I hope this helps.

Over the Great Lakes and Midwest, our Drought continues. There has been beneficial rainfall over some of the area, during the past week, but this has not been enough to really end the on-going drought. Above normal rainfall is expected over some of this area in the next two weeks but even that will likely not end the drought. It will however help some.

Recent rainfall has helped our drought improve some, but with rainfall anomalies being between 4 and 7 inches over the past 3 months, that has not come close to ending our current drought.

I wanted to add more depth to what I wrote yesterday. The question I want to address is how much rain do we actually need to end this drought? You may be supersized by how much rain it would take!

To end our current drought over southern Michigan we would need around 6 inches of rain by the end of July. This is near record totals for July at most of our climate sites. It would seem unlikely given our current weather pattern we would get that much widespread rainfall. So while we do expect more rain in the next month than the previous month, the expected rainfall will likely fall short of ending this drought.

After nearly 2 months of very limited rainfall, our area (Southwest Michigan) finally had around an inch of rain between the 25th and 26th of June. My blog below will look at the impact of that on our drought and the forecast going forward for the next 2 week to see if we will have a mitigation of our current drought.

Our current drought and it’s impacts continue across Michigan, this blog looks at what is happening now and then what we should expect going forward into mid July.

Rain is on the way for Sunday into Tuesday, this will help our developing drought over Lower Michigan but it likely will not be enough to end it.

It’s been unusually dry is Lower Michigan since early May, this is expected to change by Sunday.

A Very Dry May is Expected to be Followed by a Not all the Wet June over Southern Lower Michigan (at least through mid June)

May in Southwest Michigan was one of the top 10 driest on Record, the fist half of June is not expected to be all that much wetter.